You Don't See That Every Day

  The last few Saturdays at the farm have been busy ones. We've had a number of people out weeding the garden, stacking firewood, hoeing garden areas, planting garden areas, watering garden areas, cutting grass, and brush.... And we are almost done with suckering and painting our newest orchard. We're down to the last six rows (480 trees). It may sound like a lot to some but considering all the rows we have done I'm excited that we're down to just a few! After this Saturday I'm hoping to move on to another Farm project When my dad was alive he was in charge of when to plant the garden, and other Farm chores around the place. This year has been a bit of a learning curve for all of us, figuring out when to plant, how to repair things, and just do all the millions of jobs my dad did out on the farm. For some reason in some of the crops we planted not everything came up. I feel like we would have been enjoying fresh lettuce and some other vegetables by now. It was almos...

 It took us 2 Saturdays, but we got the older orchard cleaned up of the pruning. One of drove the 4-wheeler with the trailer attached to it, while two others would walk and pick up the large sticks and branches and throw them into the trailer. It wasn't hard work, but it was a good workout. Our youngest daughter entertained us with a lovely monologue on unicorns. And added some dance moves in too. The other daughter had her music on loud enough for all to enjoy. By taking turns on who walked and who drove, we were able to stay on task better.  The Mr. has almost gotten the suckering done too. This year he is doing it by machine instead of us all getting down on our knees and manually clipping the suckers. So the plus side is my knees are feeling good. The drawback is that I didn't get in miles and miles of 'lunges' this year.  On the other hand, walking up and down rows in the new orchard, flagging the trees we need to replant, has garnered me lots of steps on my step c...

I can hardly believe it, but we are nearly done with pruning the one variety of trees in the new orchard. So, we planted 6000 trees last winter, half of them Wepster variety, the other half MacDonald variety. We started pruning the MacDonalds 2 weeks ago and we are nearly finished. We have about 150 left to do, which will be about 2 hours of work. We are pruning them to shape them for the future. At this point we want all the energy to go into growing the tree, not extra branches. The Wepster variety... well we might not prune them this year. Some growers do not prune the first couple of years even. The trees we have of this variety are kind of small and spindly, so we don't want to make too many cuts to them at this point. If that's the case, all we have left to do is finish the suckering in the old orchard and clean up the trimmings. Then replant the 300+ trees that died from last year. Perhaps when that is done, I can talk the Mr. into taking the kids on a little play time t...

 Back in 2018 June, we started our hazelnut planting. Our "older" orchard refers to the first trees we put in the ground, all 4000 of them, in the winter of 2018-19. One year ago from now, back in 2022, we planted 6000 more filbert trees with the help of many family members and some hired hands. This bigger orchard is what I will refer to as the newer orchard.  This week in the older orchard, we are nearing the end of pruning! I feel like we should have some kind of celebration when we finish. We have about 200 trees to go. I think by Saturday we should be able to finish completely. I have high hopes.  But wait, there's more. There's always more to do on a farm. We have the newer orchard that may or may not be pruned and this year. We just planted these little trees a year ago and I'm not sure if the Boss wants to prune or not. Either way, he will probably be doing the majority of that pruning, while I work away on the suckers in the older orchard. Suckers are the...

It's a new year, so I am going to try and start some new practices. One of which is blogging about our orchard each week. This week in the orchard we are pruning the hazelnut trees. We started back in December and we're now more than halfway through our older orchard of 4000 trees.  Why prune? Well, the lower branches hit the tractor and the farmer, causing potential damage to each one. (And no one wants a damaged farmer around here.) As we prune the lower branches and those that hang out the wrong way we are training the tree to grow upwards. Pruning the branches pushes the energy for growth to the upward limbs.  It's not hard work, but it takes a long time right now. The day will come, so I'm told, when we won't be pruning much at all. And mostly doing it with pole saws or chain saws. Right now it's loppers and hand clippers.  In the beginning of pruning season my hand and arm were so sore after a long day of snipping. But now, a month into it, I don't ach...